How much energy is saved by the recycling efforts of the average 3 bed household on a weekly basis?
The reason I ask is that we have to wash every tin, bottle and bit of plastic that we have to recycle and I'm thinking that we're using more hot water now than we used to and that water is heated with gas and/or electricity...
Si
Assuming you have a dishwasher as I do, then wash these items in the bowl you have used for the pans etc. that are too big for the DW before you tip it down the drain, works for us.
HTH
John
Have a look at this:
Do what I do, just give it a rinse under the cold water tap (water wastage I know) or in the used dish-washing water (too tight fisted to buy a dishwasher) and then sling it in the recycling bin.
BRG
Don't get me started.
I am of the firm opinion that once you have to wash a tin to throw it away, you have doubled the waste it causes.
I ws talking to amate of mine about energy, and the subject of off peak came up 'It's odd' I said 'I don't have storage heaters or anything on at night, but my off peak usage is bigger than my on peak'
'Do you put the dishwasher on last thing at night? 'well SHE does. And the washing machine"
'ahh...'
So the dishwasher and washing machine together use as much electricity as the all the other stuff on during the day...
I think you are washing them too well!
Apart from the bit 'we are not running out of oil' I have to say I agree with it.
Current raw material prices make recycling of metals cost effective. Bottles and tin cans tho, probably are not, and waste paper and plastic certainly aren't.
At a time of rising sea and flood levels, some judicious landfills into levees, of general household waste ought to be the no 1 best use of generalised rubbish.
If I had to guess, I'd reckon there's about 40 Watt*Hours of energy needed to make an average size tin can (anyone with actual numbers, please jump in) To re-smelt and reprocess a recycled can is what? maybe half of that, so you save about 20 WH for a can. Water takes a little over 4 Joules to raise 1gm by 1C. 1 Joule of energy is 1 Watt for 1 Second, so if you need 25cc of water and have to heat it from 10C to 40C, the energy needed is 4 * 25 * 30 Joules = 3000 Watt*Seconds or about 1 WH, so yes purely in terms of the electricity you use, it's worth doing - although you consume the power but the council gets the benefit. Once you take into account the energy needed to collect and process the junk and deliver, collect and process the waste water, the equation tilts a little further from ideal, but is still marginally worth doing. You could always rinse them out in cold water...
I still don't see why/how they can make you clean your garbage before you throw it away, esp if you leave the labels on :-?
be sorted".
I am of the opinion that after I wash the cans and bottles and put them in the container provided and then watch the refuse collector stand at the side of the diesel spewing truck seperating cans from glass and knowing that at last estimate 83% of materials seperated for recycling goes to landfill, the country/ council is run by idiots.
Only if you draw hot water specially to wash it. The extra cost of washing it along with a load of washing you were doing anyway is negligible.
she uses the dishwasher
Probably none.
The reality is that it is pointless, politically correct bollocks.
What you are being asked to do is the local authorities work for them, in order that they can reduce their costs and meet the handed down commitments resulting from acquiescence to nitwits in Brussels.
In message , Andy Hall writes
We all know it's true - Jane Horrorks says so on the telly
One bottle can power a PC for ten minutes - yeah right
I really find the figures on that advert unbelievable. I don't reckon they can take into account all the costs of transporting and processing the glass - I can see it working from the point of view of sand in the glass factory VS old glass in the glass factory, but not once transport costs have been taken into account.
Glass isn't particularly green - containers are relatively bulky and heavy, meaning you could get more into plastic containers, and save on transport costs. Even if the plastic doesn't biodegrade, it is at least small...
Indeed. Has anyone factored in the environmental cost of an extra lorry on every round to collect recycling?
Yup. Targets again. Very easy for a polititician to pretend to solve a problem by issuing a target. First thing middle management then does is to fudge the figures to meet it.
Hitting the target - missing the point.
Each can go twice as far (on average) locally before the long trip to where they are emptied.
Seen enough of that, particularly with middle management jobsworths.
Get the right target and hit it right. I could think of one or two (with a baseball bat!).
And are you supposed to take the labels off ..That may or may not be easy but even the ones that come off easily leave a residue of adhesive so how does that get taken off .That surely takes energy of some sort
Depends on how it is done, here in Cherwell we have recycling one week, land fill (building rubble :-) ) the next. Since they take a wide range of stuff in an ordinary dust cart and sort it (at least part automated) at the collection site they take a good amount (wheelie bins full), and so the lorry use is much the same.
Another thing to remember is some councils, Bath and Bristol and some London transfer the rubbish by train to Calvert, Buckinghamshire, so the distance covered by the lorry is trivial in comparison. Mind you, Calvert is such a big site the gas produced generates 12 MW.
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